I have Poser 11.1.34759 on Mac Sierra. IMAC 2017. The magnifier tool always jumps to the translate tool after I click in the scene.. Also, I can zoom in by selecting it and clicking. But Poser will not let me zoom out (CMD + click doesn't work: it keeps zooming in).

I have used the magnifier tool on my old PC Poser 11.1, and it works fine.

I need to be able to zoom and pan without moving the camera. Any suggestions ?

I'm a little confused. Panning implies using a camera on a specific orientation. You can ... match the auxiliary camera to your main camera and with parameter dials ONLY moving it along x and y and not z axis. That should be a work around to what you want.

Change the focal length ?

I'm sorry, I meant to say scrolling and zooming without using the camera. Say when I'm in the middle of an animation and I do something stupid and can't see an object. Then I need to scroll around and/or zoom with affecting the animation. Or, can I just turn off the camera animation key ?

You can as you say use the animating option for the camera,

The best approach is probably one of these two ways

1. Set up the camera the way you need it in the animation with the animating turned on and when you are happy you turn it off again. It will still keep the keys but not add new ones or change those you have made. When you are ready to render you turn on the animating option again.

2. You can setup of the main camera as your animation camera, simply meaning you do all the animating here, then change to the AUX camera while working and when you are ready to render you just switch back to the main camera.

Thanks for the tip ! I will report the magnifier bug to SM.

@waynewiz: I'm also using Poser Pro 11 on a Mac, and here's how the magnifier tool has always worked for me (as far back as Poser 9): After I've chosen it from the Tools menu, I click and drag over an area in the preview window that I want to zoom in on. So maybe what you're missing is the click AND DRAG part?

As far as I know, zooming in is the only option. To zoom back out, I just use the keyboard shortcut for "restore camera" (shift command h). That re-sets the view to the active camera's most recently "memorized" state. (So obviously that only works if you memorized the camera's settings before using the magnifier!)

As for dealing with changes in an animation timeline, here's what I do: I turn animation OFF for all my cameras except the Main camera, and I only use the Main camera to actually frame each shot. For anything else I might need to do on a frame, I use the Aux, Pose, Face or orthographic cameras, all of which are quickly accessed via keyboard shortcuts. (You have to enter your own shortcut for the Aux camera, on Poser's Preferences panel). If I need to see something on a particular frame the way the Main camera sees it, in order to fix a pose or whatever, then I just copy the Main camera's parameters on that frame to the Aux camera.

You can also, of course, add new cameras to the scene, but as far as I can tell there's no way to assign keyboard shortcuts to them, so I don't use that method.

Hope that helps!

Oh, and one more thing: I've gotten myself into quite a mess by switching animation on and off for the Main camera, so now I just leave it on.

Hi,

Thank you very much for your great advice. I never could figure out how to zoom back out ! I guess that I just need be more careful with the cameras. Thanks again.